More Winter Birds

Donna put out extra bird food after the heavy snow, and we had some beautiful visitors.

A Stellar’s Jay visited. They have been learning how to eat from the feeders; when they first tried it, they hardly got any food. They would jump, but the feeders are made for either woodpeckers or small seed-eaters, and neither type offers an easy perch for a Jay. This one is resting after working hard at the woodpecker feeder: he would sit on the porch railing, then jump up to the feeder and peel off a bit of food. He got more and more skilled at this as the afternoon wore on.

And then he surprised me by finally being able to perch for a while on the feeder, although as you can see below his exists with some food were not exactly graceful.

The awkward feeding of a Stellar's Jay.

Numerous Towhees also visited. I like the tough-guy pose of this one:

But there were some even more dramatic poses on display.

Towhees checking out the feeders before a raid...

Towhees are not easily intimidated, either. Very stoic in the face of swooping and diving.

.I managed to get a full sequence of photos during some particularly vicious bird-on-bird diving attacks—talons first seems to be the most threatening type. Will post those tomorrow.

These photos were taken testing one of my lenses, the 200-600 Sony zoom. I really wanted to like it, but it had trouble focusing on moving subjects. I recently installed a firmware update, and I was testing to see if it helped. It helped enormously. I used to get less than half of the shots I attempted in focus—this time, 98% of them were focused just the way I wanted them to be. All of these shots have wonderful feather detail and (mostly) sharp eyes. The few that didn’t focus involved birds who were not sideways to the lens, or had eyes in shadow. I can live with those limitations; when we have summer sunshine, I can use a smaller aperture for a larger depth of field (focus zone).